The present invention relates to a new and distinct cultivar of Leucanthemum commonly known as Shasta daisy, which is grown as an ornamental plant for use in the garden and landscape. The new cultivar is known botanically as Leucanthemum x superbum and will be referred to hereinafter by the cultivar name ‘Real Snowball’. This application is co-pending with the application for the inventors' variety of Leucanthemum plant named ‘Real Deal’ U.S. patent application Ser. No. 16/501,889.
Leucanthemum is a genus within the family Asteraceae in which the commonly referred to “flower” is botanically the inflorescence which is comprised of outer showy ray florets surrounding smaller disc florets.
‘Real Snowball’ arose and was selected from an ongoing breeding program which was conducted in a nursery in West Sussex, United Kingdom. The breeding program commenced in 2006 with the aim of developing new and improved commercial varieties of Leucanthemum. Each year's breeding cycle consists of controlled pollination between chosen male and female parents including unnamed and unreleased seedlings retained from previous breeding cycles. Seed from each year's cycle is harvested and sown in the fall, and new seedlings are raised and evaluated in the following summer.
‘Real Snowball’ is a seedling selection that resulted from the controlled pollination in 2011 of a single plant of the inventors' proprietary Leucanthemum seedling code ‘L9050-10’ (unreleased and unpatented) as the female parent, using pollen from a single plant of the inventors' proprietary Leucanthemum seedling code ‘L9023-8’ (unreleased and unpatented) as the male parent. The inventors selected ‘Real Snowball’ in 2013 for its combination of tight clumping basal branching and upright habit, and domed to hemispherical large inflorescences which are pure white in color and held on strong flower stems.
‘Real Snowball’ was first asexually propagated by the inventors in West Sussex, United Kingdom in 2014 using the method of vegetative division and subsequently by basal shoot cuttings. Since that time under careful observation ‘Real Snowball’ has been determined uniform, stable and true to type in subsequent generations of asexual propagation.